Developers love Groovy but dread working with Visual Basic

WE’VE NEVERHIDDEN our disdain for stories based on surveys. But that’s because they’re usually based on a survey of 17 people and concludes that 78 per cent of us prefer horses to breathing and was commissioned purely as a means to get free advertising for a brand of biscuits.

Not so, however, Stack Overflow, whose users rank in the hundreds of thousands and who ask useful questions that developers actually want to know the answers to.

The latest survey has had a huge response from UK users and has been turned into the UK and Ireland Developer Hiring Landscape 2018 report.

There are loads to wade through but the highlights for Blighty include a mean salary of £45,000 in England. In Scotland it’s slightly lower, £42,000, in Wales, £41,500 and in Northern Ireland a shocking £37,750.

The best way to earn the most is to specialise in DevOps. It’s this lot that earns the most for the least experience relative to others at the same salary – in fact, it’s the second-highest average salary in the UK at £55,000. Above that, engineering managers earn £67,000.

If you’re looking to learn a language for cash (and we won’t judge you, 78 per cent said cash was their main driver in job choice), Groovy is the highest paying language in the country, followed by Scala and Go. Ones to avoid are Matlab, VBA and Visual Basic 6, which all pay well below other languages at the same expertise level.

The lowest priority in terms of benefits and perks for potential employees is child care benefit (27 per cent) and parental leave (16 per cent).

As for favourite languages, Javascript, HTML and CSS are the most used whilst Visual Basic 6, Groovy and Perl are the least.

Favourite languages to use are Kotlin and Rust, followed by Python, Typescript and Go.

On the other hand, 90 per cent of respondents said they dread working with Visual Basic 6 and Cobol.

Most sought-after languages among employers are Python and Go.

This is just skimming the surface of course. The full report covers everything from age to the last time you went job hunting.

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